The Trump administration’s separate attempt to cut NIH overhead reimbursement rates could cost the economy $6.1 billion, The Chronicle’s Karin Fischer reports. Though the cuts have also been blocked in court, IMPLAN, an economic-software company, analyzed what would happen as a result of curtailed research activities, reduced supply-chain spending, and lower household spending.
- Some 46,000 jobs could be affected. Two-thirds aren’t directly related to research but are instead in connected industries, whether they manufacture microscope lenses or serve fast food to researchers on their lunch breaks.
- Superstar cities could feel the pinch. It’s not only the so-called coastal elites in Boston and San Francisco who’ve built innovation-friendly images around colleges and medical centers. Think also about hubs like Cleveland and Salt Lake City.
That’s to say nothing of the potential blow from lost international collaboration. Arn Keeling, a professor of geography at Memorial University, in Canada, told Karin that he called off plans to be a panelist at the upcoming conference in Pittsburgh.
- “Why would I spend tax dollars on travel to a country that has declared economic war on Canada?” Keeling asked. “Those are discretionary funds that I could just as well spend on a conference in Canada or in the Nordic countries where I have a lot of collaborations.”
Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation is being rocked by cuts and a hunt for diversity, equity, and inclusion work, Carly Anne York writes in The Chronicle Review. Deep cuts being considered to the NSF’s $9-billion budget would compound damage from firings that have already taken place, and from searches through funded projects for DEI-associated terms like “gender,” “ethnicity,” and “systemic.”
That threatens to undermine a research enterprise rooted in the World War II era. Vannevar Bush, the former vice president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, drafted a report then that helped to extend the federal research spending that grew during the war into peacetime. He argued that science needs researchers insulated from “the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity.”
- “The Trump administration’s assault on the NSF represents precisely the kind of political interference Bush sought to prevent — one that threatens not only scientific progress but also the very foundation of academic freedom,” York writes.
“We’re seeing education being made into a political football,” Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College, told The Chronicle Review’s Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin. “It takes decades and decades to build these institutions, but they can be ripped apart in just a couple of years.”
Colleges have been withdrawing Ph.D. admission offers, The Chronicle’s Maddie Khaw reports. Institutions are seeking to cut their spending commitments amid all of the financial and political uncertainty.
The bigger picture: Researchers, international scholars, prospective students, even those who live and work near universities … the list of people whose lives could change stretches on and on. But for all the quantifiable effects on finances and career trajectories, don’t lose sight of the declining trust in institutions that led to this moment, as well as the lost trust that will follow it.
- “I’ve been warning people in academia for quite some time that they were losing tremendous trust, especially from one side of the political aisle and from the general population,” Keith Whittington, of Yale Law School, told Evan and Len. “This reckoning has come much faster and much more severely than I would have expected.”
Read the full stories:
